UBC raising funds for Doctors without Borders fight against Ebola Special

Vancouver
-
On Black Friday, instead of shopping, students and teachers from the University of British Columbia's English Language Institute held a fair to raise funds for Doctors Without Borders fight against Ebola.

UBC English Language Institute's Angie Gerst, Elise Hirschi, Janelle Sheen, Heather Lill, Mira Milutinovic, Sheryl Hovde and Sylvia Ozbalt from the Green-Global Responsibility Instructor Working Group organized the event along with enthusiastic students and instructors. Vendor booths featured a variety of things ranging from baked goods, knitted artwork, handmade jewelry, books and more. The unofficial total amount raised for the cause was $1590.

Instructor Joy Lin Salzberg's class held an auction selling interesting items and services such as Spanish and Italian lessons taught by her students, movie tickets and a fly eating plant. The auction alone raised $375 towards the cause.

According to the latest WHO Situation Report released on November 26, 2014, there is a total of 15,901 of confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola virus disease. As of November 24, 2014, there have been 5674 deaths reported by the Ministries of Health of Guinea and Sierra Leone, and 22 November by the Ministry of Health of Liberia.

"Eight months into the Ebola epidemic, the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders is still the most functional outfit in a dysfunctional global health system. Yet its outsize role in the crisis threatens to overwhelm what is still at heart a medical aid group. The human costs to the organization have been high. To date, 24 of its workers have contracted Ebola and 13 have died. Twenty-one of the infected and all of those who have died were local, African employees." - Wall Street Journal